


His Eternal Partner

by JuniorWoofles



Series: Gold and Rust [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mildly Possessive Master, Post-Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, Self-Esteem Issues, Telepathy, The Doctor (Doctor Who) Needs a Hug, The Master Has Issues, enemies AND friends AND lovers, look they're both hurting but they need each other, the doctor has issues, written for the Master's birthday but a day late because that's just how I am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:28:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28533681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniorWoofles/pseuds/JuniorWoofles
Summary: There they both were, drifting through space and trying to pretend that the thing that they wanted most in the world wasn’t just to run to each other and hope that it would be enough to make everything okay again.Angsty hurt/comfort written for the Master’s birthday, post RotDStandalone in a series of unconnected fics
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Series: Gold and Rust [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2024612
Comments: 2
Kudos: 41





	His Eternal Partner

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to try and write something lighter for the Master's birthday but because I was a day late I was thinking 'what if the Doctor was a day late' and because of _Revolution of the Daleks_ I kind of spiralled from there. So this is just a quick little thing I wrote this afternoon based off of that and as always, it ended up being so much angstier than I intended it to be, but that's what happens when I try and write about these two incredibly messed up idiots.
> 
> Canon compliant, post RotD, just two idiots with a lot of trauma and issues who love each other a lot even if they won’t say it out loud. 
> 
> Title from Segun Akinola and the series 12 soundtrack.
> 
> Unbeta'd so all mistakes are my own. I've only seen _Revolution_ once so I’m sorry if I got some of the details wrongs. And the Master has a Tardis in this and I can’t remember if he’s meant to or not but I figured he stashed some spares before he burned Gallifrey, so just go with it.

_Knock knock knock knock_

_Knock knock knock knock_

At first he couldn’t be sure where the knocking was coming from. There had been a time when he was so acquainted with the all too familiar drumming in his head that at first The Master just assumed that it seemed to be a lost echo of that. But no. This was new. He pricked his ears up to hear if the noise was coming from the general direction of his TARDIS door but no. He’d been right the first time. 

Someone was knocking in his mind. 

(He couldn’t tell if this was more or less concerning than someone finding his TARDIS in the middle of space.)

Groaning, he rolled over and tried to ignore it but it came again, tentative and soft as it gently nudged against his mind. 

Only one person alive in this whole galaxy would ever be so cautious as to try and ask permission to fully enter his mind while having the full power to just invade it if they so wished. 

_Knock knock knock knock_

_Knock knock knock knock_

A gentle tapping, so soft as if they were scared they were going to be turned away at any second but hoping that miraculously they’d be allowed to enter. 

He didn’t owe her a miracle and he wasn’t in the business of giving her what she wanted, but she was preventing him from curling up and trying to sleep. At this point in his very lonely and miserable day he wanted nothing more than to shut everything out and wait for it to be over. But, it was proving to be a little hard to ignore the world when she was so insufferably loud. 

_‘Contact,’_ he thought anyways with some reluctance, snarling the word out loud. It came out almost too vicious in the quiet space of his lonely TARDIS. 

‘ _Contact.’_ He heard her echo come through, and it made his hearts stutter. The last time she’d called to him she’d been so confident and arrogant but now she seemed lost. If he didn’t know any better he’d have said she sounded broken. 

He’d let her in and the incessant knocking had finally stopped, but it had only been replaced by silence. It was unsettling, really, knowing she was there as a silent lurker while not saying what she came here to say. 

_‘What do you want,’_ he finally ground out, not willing to have a stand off when they were both so vulnerable. 

Still silence seemed to be his only answer. He scowled into the emptiness around him and raised his eyes to the ceiling in aggravation before he decided to do something about it. He had never been as diplomatic or polite as she was, so he decided to find the answers for himself, especially if it seemed she wasn’t going to offer them up herself. 

He prodded into her mind a little more, trying to find the source of her discomfort. Maybe it had been weighing on her mind, or maybe she’d just given up trying to hide from him. Whatever it was, he found his answer quickly. It only took a quick search before he could feel all of it. All the loss, the suffering, the pain; those decades of waiting coming apart in the span of a couple of days. 

He knew it should make him feel something. Triumphant. Even just happy. She was miserable and lost. He’d won. But he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t delivered her to the Judoon, left her to rot in that cell, hadn’t made her pets leave her. 

He just felt empty. Nothing. Maybe he could pretend it was just her emptiness reverberating through him but that wasn’t it. It wasn’t just her emotions he was feeling. It was his own. 

Or truthfully, the lack of. 

This was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? The Doctor defeated, without hope. 

No, a small voice in his head that sounded a bit too much like Missy reminded him. It was never about that. He’d just wanted the Doctor to notice him, to feel something, _anything_ because of him.

‘ _Like a boy pulling pigtails in the schoolyard_ ,’ the Doctor supplied helpfully in his mind. He scowled again. Of course there was no peace after she’d initiated contact. His thoughts were now hers as much as hers were his. Why did he think this was going to be a good idea?

‘ _I’ll just go,_ ’ she said, sounding so small and defeated. 

He hated it. 

‘ _No_ ,’ he said, managing to pull her back even as she started to slip away again. 

She was always slipping away from him. Not this time. Not today of all days.

‘ _Okay._ ’

_‘Stay.’_

_‘Okay.’_

She’d never been this agreeable before. The Doctor had simply just never done as she was told without even the pretence of a fight. 

It was unnerving. 

It was wrong. 

He didn’t like it one bit. It made his hearts turn and he was filled with an unbearable need to help her. 

‘ _I don’t need your help,_ ’ her small voice supplied, but the lack of bite made it sound unconvincing. She sounded like she’d just given up on fighting. 

He needed her to fight again. 

He didn’t know what had broken her this time; whether it was something in prison, or Daleks, or her so-called fam, but whatever it was he was going to fix it. He was going to fix her. 

She scoffed in his mind and gently shoved an image of Gallifrey burning at him. She sent it so gently that it felt wrong. They both knew he didn’t deserve gentle. He’d never treated her like that, especially not when he’d burned their home, imprisoned her in the ruins of it and forced the truth upon her. 

He hadn’t helped her then.

He’d broke her. 

He was bearing the brunt of her anguish when all he had done was show her the truth. 

_They’d_ been the ones who’d broken her, not him. Not really. 

‘ _No one left to be mad at,_ ’ she reminded him but she didn’t sound mad. She didn’t even sound upset. It just felt hollow and he felt the hollowness ache in his hearts. 

Right. Everyone else was gone. He’d made sure of that. 

It was just the two of them left. 

‘ _I’m left._ ’ He was. It was always just the two of them, never truly giving up on each other, clinging tight whie everything burned around them. He wasn’t going to leave her. Not if he had any say in it. 

Silence was all he got back in return. Of course she was reverting back to silence again. 

‘ _Be mad at me._ ’ He didn’t really know what had possessed him to say that. All he knew was that he needed her to come back to him, no matter what he had to say to get her to do so. 

The ensuing silence seemed to stretch on forever, only broken by her absentmindedly sifting through his memories. The Academy. Autons. Cybermen. Prime Minister. Utopia. Prisons. UNIT. O. 

So many schemes, failed plots and disguises she’d eventually seen through. But always, everything was to get her to notice him. The great Doctor. Always feeling responsible. Never giving up on him, not enough that she didn’t think each new face offered her a new chance. Always finding a way back to him. The one precious gift she never failed to give him. 

‘ _Okay._ ’

He failed her, over and over and over. But she never failed him. Never. 

‘ _Okay,_ ’ she repeated again, as if to give them both the reassurance they both so desperately needed. 

He nudged the coordinates into her mind, with all the gentleness she’d given to him, and let the connection break. 

She could find him now. All he had to do was wait. And he would _always_ wait for his Doctor. 

💙

He waited for her. And he waited. And waited. 

He'd thought she'd turn up instantly, her usual smile plastered on her face as she pretended she was totally fine. It was what she always did when she was breaking inside. He'd seen that look cross too many of her faces on too many of their lifetimes. He'd been the cause of it as many times as he hadn't. 

But he couldn't fix it if she didn't show up. 

Usually he thrived with the urge to break and destroy but when someone else had gotten to his Doctor and done more damage than he ever could? That was unacceptable. No one was allowed to affect her like he could. He needed to put things to rights. 

He tried reaching out to her but he couldn't find her. Wherever she was, it was too far for him to find. Unless she wasn't looking to be found. 

Maybe it had all been a ruse and she had just needed to distract him. Get him to focus on her pain so she could stop one of his schemes. He racked his brain to see if there was something he was forgetting but he came up short. Unless his future self had waylaid her, she wasn't late because of him. 

Stupid, stupid Master, always believing that he could get the Doctor to drop everything for him. What was the point of being her best enemy if he couldn't get her attention at the drop of a hat?! 

As he growled and stormed around his console for the hundredth time, he contemplated just trying to find her himself. But as much of a fool as he was, he was loath to start chasing her around. Not when she knew where to find him. If he went after her he could miss her by mere moments and then he'd never hear the end of it. 

No he just had to be patient and wait. 

However, he had never been a man of virtues and his already thin patience was wearing out. He just needed to see her. His beautiful, incredible idiot. He had to know she was okay. Not the bullshit version of okay she offered to her friends who didn't know any better, but actually okay. 

She was meant to get back up again. That was their unspoken deal. He’d come in with his flashy schemes and plans to take over this world or the next and she’d come storming in with all of her righteous fury and put a stop to him. He’d cut her down, find ways to manipulate her and hurt her; go after the things she cared most about: her stupid friends, her precious Tardis, the dumb planet she loved more than she was supposed to, home. He’d take them away from her, bit by bit and her hearts would break but then they’d heal and they’d start the dance all over again.

It was how it had always been. Throughout all of their lifetimes. Pain and sorrow, anguish and hate, need and want. Everything in the correct balance.

He didn’t want to think about what would happen if she gave up. The Doctor just didn’t give up. Never. If there was one thing anyone in the whole damn Galaxy could count on the Doctor for, it was not giving up. She kept going, kept fighting through all of her own heartache because the whole damn universe needed her to. 

Forget the universe, he needed her to. 

He just needed her.

As if the universe could read every painful wish that ached in his very being, he heard the faint knocking again. He stopped his pacing and listened, waiting to see if she was going to try and invade his mind again, no doubt with pitiful apologies about how she wasn’t going to be able to come see him after all and how he should just give up and go get a hobby that didn’t just involve around her entire being. 

But no, this time the knocking wasn’t a soft pressure in his mind. It was just as incessant but louder and although it was enough to give him a headache it was happening out with his mind. 

_Knock knock knock knock_

_Knock knock knock knock_

His hearts racing, he nearly tripped over himself running to the door of his TARDIS and janked it open with a flourish. 

“Well, aren’t you going to invite me in? It’s freezing out here,” she grumbled quietly, holding her thin arms against her chest. He nodded dumbly and moved so she could push past him fully into his console room. He looked out at the stars drifting past and her own TARDIS bobbing along next to his. Nothing seemed changed there. It was the same stars as it had been the last time he’d looked and her TARDIS hadn’t properly changed since sometime in the 1960s. He closed the door softly and turned to look at her. 

She was staring at the console, eyes boring holes into a random piece of machinery by her left hand. Her eyes were vacant and lost and even though he knew she could hear him moving closer to her, her eyes never left his console.

“Doctor,” he tried, but she kept on ignoring him. “Doctor, look at me.” He was close enough to her that he could have reached out and wrapped her small body against his but although his fingers ached to reach out and do just that, he resisted the urge. If he was going to comfort her, the very least she could do was acknowledge him with more than just some curt words at his door. 

“Doctor. _Doctor._ ” He tried again to no avail and tried brushing his mind up against hers but she was refusing contact. He could feel the familiar pull of rage clouding his thoughts but he tried to ignore it. Now was not the time to get angry, not when she was lost and defeated and acting like she was truly broken this time. 

Actually, no. This was the perfect time to get angry he thought, letting the comfort of it burn through him once more. 

“Wow, not only are you stupidly late to meet me, but when you finally do get here all you do is snap at me and then immediately close off again? What great company you are, Doctor. I was trying to do the nice thing for once and you’re ignoring that? You’re ignoring me?! I don’t know why you spent hundreds of years trying to get me to care if you’re just going to shut me out the second I even consider it. What’s the point of it, Doctor? What’s the point in you?!” 

Satisfied, he finished yelling at her, relishing in the way that his words seemed to spark the tiniest reactions from her. Even when she was trying to ignore him she never could do it properly. Standing in front of him, eyes locked on the controls she seemed to be curling into herself. 

He felt the tiniest smile lift the corner of his mouth as he waited for her to rise to the bait, but she ignored it entirely in favour of something else. 

“I’m late?” she asked in a hollow voice. There was something about the way she broke on the second word that made the Master’s smile fall from his face and his anger burn out. Ignoring everything else, he gently took her hand from where it was aimlessly fiddling with nothing and took it up to his mouth and pressed a soft kiss to her palm. 

“You’re here now.”

“But I’m late.”

“It doesn’t matter. You got here.” 

She finally looked at him and somewhere in her hazel eyes there was a spark of the young boy he had loved for all of his life times. She looked right back at him like she was seeing him for the first time since she’d marched on board and whatever she saw in his eyes, it seemed to be the last straw. 

He barely had enough time to catch her before she was collapsing in his arms, wordless sobs shaking their bodies. He simply held her through it, stroking her hair and gently trying to nudge happier memories into her mind. Her resolve seemed to crumble and although she tried to push him away she gave up and let her fill her mind with soft auburn skies and two little boys running hand in hand towards the flaming sunset. 

He held her against his chest as she sobbed, letting all the pain come out at last. It was only when he felt her tears against the fabric of his shirt that he gently took her elbow and pulled her away from him slightly. Not enough that she would think that he was pushing her away, but enough that she could see him as he spoke to her. 

“Can you walk?” he asked softly, getting nothing but a quizzical eyebrow in return. He sighed heavily and simply scooped her up into his arms and carried her through to his bedroom. He vaguely felt her giggling somewhere in his mind, but it didn’t seem to carry over to her as she clung to him and continued to bury her head in his shirt. 

“You’re a nightmare,” he muttered softly, pressing a kiss to her forehead before casually tossing her down on his bed. 

“Hey!” she exclaimed, turning to look at him with daggers in his eyes. He leaned down and pressed a quick kiss to her lips before he turned and sat down on his bed, pulling her towards him so she could sit in the V of his legs. 

“I couldn’t resist,” he said with a dark grin, wrapping his arms tighter around her waist and feeling her own fall on top. 

They simply sat like that for a long time, as he soothed away her worries with soft memories until he felt her begin to relax in his arms a bit. He was just about to ask her for an explanation when she spoke first. 

“I was ten months late.”

Figuring she was talking about her infernal pets again, he just hummed and let her continue in her own time. 

“I was in the Judoon prison ship for too many years. Decades even,” she said and on instinct his arms tightened around her waist. “It’s not your fault. If it wasn’t for you I might not have known why I was even being chased in the first place.” She absently ran her hand in circles around his wrist as she continued. “Once they got me they started adding up a bunch of other things and gave up after seven thousand and just left me in there.”

“They only gave up at seven?!”

“Jack said the same thing.”

He scoffed and tucked his head over her shoulder. 

“Scoff all you want, he got me out of there. And then I… I… ”

_‘It’s okay. Just take your time.’_

“That’s the problem,” she responded out loud. “I didn’t realise I had. I just thought I’d left them for a couple of minutes. Maybe a week tops. But it was ten months.”

She sounded so hurt, broken and distressed at the thought of being late and it hurt to hear it. He could take her agony, but not when it was over something this frivolous. 

“Okay, and you had to wait decades to get to them so I think you win there. What’s your point?” 

She didn’t reply but she nudged the memories towards him. Anger, sadness, disappointment. A hard push. Dropped eye contact like they couldn’t meet her eyes anymore. A group hug as the old one and his grandson walked away. They’d finally realised she wasn’t perfect. She messed up sometimes, and it was inevitable they’d get caught in the cross hairs. It had been time. 

Her memory changed as she pushed more towards him. Twelve years too late to see a child again, a promise only collected another two years too late, a mother in hysterics thinking her daughter was missing, a boyfriend taking the brunt of the blame. Small mistakes she couldn’t undo, no matter how much she might wish to. 

They were beings out of time. Her more so than him. She could never stick to time or promises, no matter how hard she tried or how much it broke her hearts a little every time she was left picking up the pieces from yet another mistake. It would be so easy to blame her errant TARDIS that was well past its prime and had never been able to do the one thing it was meant to. But she would never do that. 

Of course not. His precious, idiot Doctor would rather blame herself. 

She was drowning under the weight of more blame, barely finding time to pick up the pieces of herself post-prison before her friends had decided they were better off without her. Really, they were idiots. Sure, she brought chaos into the world and left destruction in her wake but she was too damn good, so earnest and hopeful as she tried to do what was best. The world without the Doctor was not one that was worth thinking about. Sure, he had tried to kill her plenty of times. He’d even managed to do so on a couple of occasions. But he always knew that his Doctor would come back to him. It was the only surety in anything, the one persistent flaw in every plan he devised. 

She was strong and powerful and wonderful. She wasn’t meant to crumble like this. 

He pressed soft kisses to her shoulders, her ear, her neck. He pressed distractions into her skin as he tried to soothe away some of the pain from her mind. Finally, she turned in his arms and kissed him, a hot burning thing that felt like a heavy emotion he didn’t quite want to even try to name. 

“It’s okay, you’re only late by a day,” he reassured her, hugging her tight as she turned properly.

“Just the one?”

“Just the one. Besides, you know I’d always wait for you.”

She smiled at that, warm and sunny and suddenly the Master felt like he couldn’t breath. Was it really that easy to please her, to convince her everything was okay, to take her pain away and make it better? Did he really not have to do anything more than promise something he didn’t think he had it in him to break? 

It wasn’t even a consideration. Of course he’d always wait for her. Whether she left him for seven minutes or seventy seven years, he’d find his way back to her eventually. 

As if she could read his mind, and he had to remind himself that she probably was, she kissed him again, melting into it slightly as her hand came up to rest against one of his hearts. 

“I’ll try to keep you waiting less,” she said, dropping a whisper of a kiss against the corner of his mouth. 

“Now, love, don’t keep promises you don’t intend to keep,” he smirked, and the ghost of a smile danced across her own face.

“Did I miss anything important?” she asked, evidently eager to move the subject on before he could properly start teasing her. 

Hurriedly he tried to reassure her that it really wasn’t anything important but before he could get the words out she gasped and looked at him with a trace of horror in her eyes. 

“I missed your birthday?!”

“Look, Doctor, it’s really not _that_ important, okay? Who cares about birthdays anymore when you’re past a thousand…”

“You care!” she said loudly, fingers curling into his shirt, though the Master couldn’t tell if it was to shake him and tell him that he was an idiot for thinking it wasn’t a big deal, or if it was her way of checking that he was still the same person who had treated their birthday like it was the only day worth anything.

She looked at him with such conviction, her nails scraping slightly on his skin as she tugged at his shirt that he really didn’t have it in him to deny her the truth. “Okay, fine, yes I care.”

She pouted again before she came to another realisation. “Wait, was that how I was able to find you yesterday?”

“If you’re implying that my subconscious was reaching out to try and find you because it was my birthday and I missed you then you would be sorely mistaken,” he glared at her slightly as if to punctuate his point but they both knew he was kidding himself as much as her. 

“I’m sorry. I should have known.”

“It’s fine, you’re here _now._ Now don’t ruin my makeup birthday by being sad, okay?” even as he teased her he could see her lip pouting again as her brow creased with thought. “I said don’t ruin it,” he warned. 

“No, I should have known. I _always_ know.”

“Hmm?”

“No matter where I am, no matter if I think you’re alive or dead, I never forget. I always just know,” she finished rather lamely, not having the words to explain it. He cradled her tight against him and as she did so she let him feel everything that she couldn’t explain. The agony of her hearts twisting, knowing that somewhere far away someone was needing her to be with them for no real reason other than selfishness and her not knowing how to answer that call. 

“I just assumed it hurt because of Ryan and Graham. I forgot it was you. I forgot you needed me.”

“You’re here now, Doctor,” he growled against her temple, kissing her brow and hoping it would be enough to dissuade some of her more typical thoughts of self-hatred from invading her mind again. “I don’t care if you’re a day late. I wouldn’t care if you were ten months late, or nineteen years late. You’re here with me now, and that’s all that matters.” _You’re all that matters_ , he almost said but held his tongue. She didn’t need to hear it out loud. She could read it in his face, in the tight hold of his arms, in the thoughts that were buzzing around both their minds. 

“You matter too,” she said softly, smiling at him with so much love that it made him want to tear his eyes from hers, even if they both knew he wouldn’t be capable of doing so. “Happy birthday,” she whispered, grinning at him and reaching up to kiss him again. 

She’d go back to her pets eventually and they’d forgive her and over time her smiles would become real again and she’d stop faking them for the sake of appearances. He’d probably get bored and come up with some scheme to get the Doctor’s attention again. But for now, she was out of prison, she was away from all of that and she was safe in his arms. Where you belong, the Master thought as he looked at her, the etch of sadness disappearing in favour of an honest smile. 

As he held her and kissed her and felt her pain melt away slowly but steadily he had to admit that it had definitely been a very happy birthday indeed. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is maybe the third fic I've written where they're just cuddling and trying to deal with their issues but it's what they both deserve. 
> 
> Comments/kudos make my day


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